She practised in her chamber now, above the street, close to the lower boughs of the great elm tree, remote from interruption, and in her zeal Conway kept with her in mind, delighting with her in each graceful run and in each whispering trill. She would speak to him continually, commenting on each effort and each achievement, assuming him in mind as a companion. “You hear that?” she would say, or “How’s that for a few first-hand remarks on the joy of being above the ground? Of running around the wheel of the seasons?” Or, inarticulate before what she did, articulating only with the cry of the strings, she felt such rush of impulse as would say: Here in this succession of sound cries out a sorrow greater than our personal sorrows, the sorrow of the whole of man at finding himself in an earth addicted to time. As would say: Here in the adagio man spreads out the infinite tentacles of his multiform being, his personality, and lays, kind for kind, each sensitive feeler upon a like that protrudes from the Source. As would say: This theme, a pastoral from some central-European rolling plain, is ours as we sit in the heart of this land where the seasons rise and fall in waves, a melancholy procession, and men mark their time with their labor as they roll the soil over from year to year endlessly plowing. Conway was with her in these articulations, in the breath of her throat, in the beat of her right hand over the gut wires. The people went by, fluttering to the county fair and back, and August was over. A disaster from the outside world, reported, passed over the town and left a ripple of hysteria. Theodosia played in her chamber, except on the day set for the appearance of her master, above the shock of the street, above the calamity, relating her carefully guarded playing, guardedly within its bounds, to Conway. The town had begun to rumble of a mishap of its own.